


The Mother

by OakwoodOuroboros



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:08:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21743482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OakwoodOuroboros/pseuds/OakwoodOuroboros
Summary: Steven, having been imprisoned at a young age, is confronted to a Gem who should hate him with all her being. Steven grows, so does the Gem, and she becomes the person that the young boy adores the most in the entire universe.
Comments: 7
Kudos: 73





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yay I'm not dead

The Diamonds struck once more, and they struck hard. The Earth was safe, for the most part, but things were looking grim. Garnet had been unfused and bubbled, Pearl had been rejuvenated, and Amethyst put under the guard and teachings of the renowned Holly Blue Agate.

At that time, Steven was but a toddler. The Crystal Gems, as prepared as they thought they were for a Gem attack on the planet, were still suffering from the lack of Rose’s guidance. The presence of the new being that Greg had called Steven was disconcerting, distracting from their goal. When Blue and Yellow both came to the planet in person to settle matters themselves, they fought, but they simply weren’t strong enough. Steven was discovered soon enough as the Diamonds tore the whole place down in their search of Rose Quartz, the traitor who had shattered one of their own.

« So this is her then, hmm ? » asked Yellow. On Blue’s request, she had not harmed the human that was now holding the toddler, who had gone oddly silent. « Odd form. Maybe we should try poofing her ? »

« No ! » shouted the life form.

 _Huh, so they are intelligent then,_ thought Yellow Diamond, surprised but not disappointed. « Well, I guess we’ll just have to seperate them and put the human in the Zoo. He might have vital information about what has happened in the last few hundred years. »

« You’re right. I guess we needed to bring a bit of variety to the gene pool anyway, » answered Blue. She kneeled down to Greg’s height and smiled. « So little life form, hand over the Gem. »

He started running, but he couldn’t get far before being stopped by a hulking Quartz soldier. Blue’s hand descended and scooped up the cowering human, who tried to escape but teetered on the edge of the hand, scrabbling back so as not to fall off. With her other hand, Blue Diamond tried to pry apart Greg’s arms. The man was holding onto the child like he was his lifeline, crying along with his son into the blanket that covered him.

« Come on, I don’t want to harm you, » promised Blue, getting frustrated.

« Don’t worry, I’ve got this. »

Yellow pulled more harshly on the little bundle that Greg was so avidly protecting, and harder, and harder, until a resounding crack came forth, followed closely by a scream of pain and the renewed wailing of the baby.

« They’re so fragile, » remarked Yellow, sighing. « Broken arm ? »

« I think so. He’s so small, i can’t really tell… »

« Whatever. We can worry about that once we get him to the Zoo. For now, we just need to get Rose Quartz to lose that form and come back to us. »

« So childish, » blue said, frowning. « Can’t you just… Shapeshift out of that ? »

« She probably won’t. And she’s making a racket too, although not as much as she used to. I’ll just zap her and get this all over with. »

Blue took a step back, taking the still whimpering Greg with her. Yellow placed the baby on the ground, held her arm out and suddenly the whole place was illuminated in a bright yellow light, that Greg had to look away from, but that Blue and Yellow gazed into without blinking.

The ray stopped as suddenly as it had started, leaving behind a small afterglow. In the dust that had been ra ised, the baby was still intact, albeit now crying even louder than he had been doing before.

« Well that worked a treat, » remarked Blue Diamond pointedly.

« Why don’t we just shatter her ? She’s being a pain, and if we bring her back whole she might cause panic in our courts. »

« White Diamond specifically asked for her to be brought back unharmed. She wants to bring her to court, for some reason. »

Yellow pinched her brow and waved her hand around, irritated. « Look, this is all too complicated. She should have been shattered already by now, what else is going to happen to her anyhow ? Her crimes are too great to be forgiven like this. »

« Yellow… Let’s just bring this human to the Zoo and then we’ll talk about it once we get back to homeworld, ok ? Let’s just… follow the mission statement and get this over with. »

Yellow Diamond sighed. « I guess you’re right. Let’s go home »

Greg wasn’t allowed to see Steven throughout the trip, no matter how much he begged and cried for him. Yellow Pearl had seen to his wounds, although she was not the most gentle of nurses, and he was left weeping a little after her ministrations. Meanwhile, Steven was enjoying the ride, still seated in Blue Diamond’s hand, and was smiling and gurgling along happily as the ship jumped into hyperspeed.

They soon arrived at the Zoo, where the Diamonds didn’t even deign getting off of the ship. Greg was pulled away by a few Amethysts, and Steven, realising that the situation wasn’t normal, cried as his father was pulled away and set amongst his new life with the Zoomans.

The boy didn’t stop crying even once they got to homeworld, didn’t stop even when the arm-ship landed, even when he was taken away by Quartz soldiers who, for some reason, were more gentle with him than they should have been with the traitor of their Diamond. It was only when the boy was set in the small cell and the lights were turned off that he stopped, feeling a presence in the room, on the other side of the glowing bars. Slowly, a yellow losange took its form in the air above the boy, the faint light bouncing off the Gem even before the face became distinct to the boy’s eyes.

« I am Jasper, and I’ll be your prison guard, _Rose Quartz_. »


	2. Chapter 2

« Why do you insist on eating this earthling food ? It’s like you can’t survive without it, or something, » grumbled the Amethyst that brought Steven his food. Well, not that he remembered he was called Steven, he was so used to being called Rose Quartz that he had taken on the name instinctively, and was now cloaked in everything the name meant.

« Look, i don’t know either, all I know is that if I don’t eat, I get weak. Remember how I nearly ran out of energy that one time ? »

« When you were still incoherent, you mean ? »

« Sure, whatever that means, » sighed Steven. « Have you got any news about the trial ? »

The Amethyst took a step back, as if she had suddenly remembered her place. « Not really. The Diamonds are probably busy. Maybe in twenty years or so, » she mused, distracted. « Maybe- »

« And what exactly are _you_ still doing here ? »

The shout resonated through the bare cell, and Steven perked up, standing to attention.

« Not you, Rose Quartz, I was talking to this _imbecile_ who takes too much time chatting and not enough time working ! I’ll inform your Agate of this behaviour, trust me ! »

« Yes, Jasper. I understand. »

« Good. Now be gone with you, and send a different soldier next time ! »

The Amethyst immediately broke her pose and scampered away, narrowly avoiding the slap that was directed at her by the elite Quartz soldier.

« And you, what were you doing, Rose Quartz ? Planning your escape ? »

« No Jasper, I was asking about my trial. »

« That is not a valid excuse. In all these years, haven’t you learned anything ? »

 _I learned I can escape any time I want,_ thought Steven, although he didn’t voice that thought out loud.

« Why are you so eager to know when you’re going to be detroyed anyway ? It’s not like it’s been that long. Only twelve years or so. »

« But it’s been long for _me_! It’s my only thing I have to look forward to in life, it’s the sole reason of my being, Jasper ! »

She snorted again. « Rose, you’re a liar and a fool. I may be younger than you but I’m still certain that you have plans and secrets hidden everywhere. Maybe that Amethyst was a spy ! »

The realisation visibly dawned on the Gem’s face, and she turned around and ran off after the other Quartz, shouting her code-name.

Steven was now alone, in the cell as well as in the larger room on which it opened up into. In this room, several weapons were lined up against the far wall, sitting there, waiting for practice. Putting a sparring room next to the cell meant that the boy was rarely unsupervised.

This was a rare opportunity, and from a young age, he had learned to take advantage of them. Quickly, he ran through the bars of his so-called prison, scampered to the far wall, and picked up an axe. It was heavy, but nothing the boy couldn’t handle considering his inhuman strength, and using both hands, he swung the weapon down.

This didn’t prove to be the best of ideas, as the axe imbeded itself into the ground and stayed stuck there, handle pointing at an angle to the ceiling. The boy had put all his strength into the swing, so he was now struggling to pull the weapon out of the reflective, scarred floor. It finally came free, and Steven, now panicking, knowing that Jasper would be back soon, replaced the weapon where he had found it and ran as fast as his legs could carry him back to the cell.

« Well well well. »

The tutt came from behind him, so he turned, only to be met with Jasper’s looming figure. It was difficult to explain the feeling that struck him at that moment ; there was fear, of course, but there was also a hint of pride, a piece of hope that this incident would mean his trial would be pronounced somewhat closer to the present date.

« So, little miss Rose Quartz has found a way to get through the bars of her cell, hmm ? I wonder what you’ve been doing while I had my back turned… Plotting ? Meeting up with some secret agent who is planning to shatter the other Diamonds ? Maybe you’re planning to shatter _me_? »

Jasper let out a brief bark of laughter, summoning her helmet and pointing it menacingly at the boy in the cell. She knew she couldn’t get through the bars to Steven, but that was nowhere near enough to stop the boy from being afraid of her.

« Why do you cower, Rose ? »

« I… I’m scared. »

« Are you now ? But there’s nothing to be afraid of, Rose. You’re safe behind bars until the Diamonds say you aren’t, and then I’ll have the honor, the _pleasure_ to shatter you myself. »

By this time, Steven was crying, huddled in a corner of his cell. Even though he had never known anything other than this, he was still miserable, he noticed. He was scared most of the time, he only had rags to clothe himself in, food was scarce and sleep was light. He was supposed to work like a Gem, but no matter how much he tried, he could not ; and no matter how hard he tried, he could not for the life of him remember these things that he was accused of.

« My only goal in life is to be destroyed, I don’t understand or remember anything that i am accused of, and there is nothing that tells me that I am really a Gem. You saw me, I can’t be poofed ! I get through the bars just fine! Tell me Jasper, please, what is wrong with me ? »

For the first time since he had known her, Jasper looked troubled. It was true that she had seen her prisoner get through the bars of his prison unscathed other from a few bars of light that had appeared on his form, and indeed, the fact that he had to eat and do other things that organic life tended to do were a little weird to her.

« I… I need to refer to my higher ups. I’ll call an Agate in, don’t move. »

She turned to the door and pressed the call button, and an Agate came running. It was rare for such Gems to be lower than Quartz in the ranking system, but Jasper was a prized warrior, thing that was getting rarer and rarer with every new generation of Gems. Even an Agate had problems facing up to her, especially one of a second generation.

« Keep an eye on her, and don’t let her touch the weapons. »

Confused, the Agate saluted and did as told, looking straight at Steven as if a single second out of her sight was enough for him to escape. Which was the case, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

Silence filled the room, and even the distant footsteps of guards in the corridors and the sounds of battle from the training rooms seemed to become more distant. Steven had nothing to do other than daydream. And daydream he did, about the events that had just taken place, about the different viewpoint he had gotten from his few seconds outside his cell, about the fair bit of interraction he had had with Jasper and the Amethyst just before. It wasn’t that he was so desperate for interaction that he craved even a scolding and the looming possibility of a premature death, he told himself, but he in fact was. All things considered, as he had told Jasper, that was the only goal he had.

Jasper was surprisingly quick to come back to the cold room, and Steven, obediant as always to the untold rules that were accounted for around Jasper, stood to attention, much like the Agate that had not even blinked since she had started watching him.

« You may leave, and not a word of this to any Gem. Clear ? »

The last word was a snarl.

« Clear. »

« Good, now begone with you. »

The Agate seemed all too happy to leave the cell chamber, and quickly sauntered out of the room.

« Now for you, » Jasper said once the blue Gem had left the room.

Steven’s fear was back. He swallowed his saliva and waited.


	3. Chapter 3

The silence went on for a while longer. It was as if Jasper was collecting her thoughts, thing that sounded weird, coming from her, but Steven couldn’t think of anything else that it could possibly be.

“So, we were not able to contact Blue nor Yellow Diamond on the matter, but we have orders from White. Of course we weren’t able to see her in person…”

Jasper’s voice petered off into a grumble, but she soon caught herself and continued on with her tirade.

“She ordered for you to be… released.”

Steven’s jaw dropped. He could not believe this in any way. Released? After having spent as much of his life as he knew behind bars, he was ordered to be released?

“Under one condition.”

Ah, of course.

“White Diamond’s army is having difficulty defending one of White’s colonies, and we need reinforcements on the battlefront. We simply can’t produce Gems fast enough, the rate at which they are shattered is unbelievable.”

She said all this without a stroke of emotion in her voice, as if all this was old news for her and the rest of Gemkind.

“You are to be rejuvenated and trained up under my orders as an elite Quartz soldier, as _you were supposed to be_ , and then sent to the front. Of course, your trial is postponed until after you have completed your service.”

There was no way Steven could think of what to say in the moment. Jasper gave him a few seconds to digest the information he had just been given.

“So… I’m free?”

She switched off the laser-bars, and for the first time in his short-by-Gem-standards life, the green light that had forever illuminated his life was gone. He had to rub his eyes to make sure, but indeed, Jasper was a far brighter orange than he had expected by the light of day.

“Yes, you’re free,” she answered. “But we need to get you rejuvenated right now. Come along, I expect you to walk in front of me and to not run away, otherwise I’ll poof you.”

The idea of having one of those wicked-looking weapons thrown at him wasn’t appealing to Steven at all; in fact his blood ran cold; he had never been injured in his life, but there was just something that irked him about the possibility of being physically harmed. Maybe because he was weird for a Gem?

Jasper picked up a weapon off the wall mounts on the far wall, before walking back to Steven, who was still hesitating to leave his cell.

“What are you waiting for?”

Steven stumbled out of his cell on trembling legs. He wasn’t like this earlier on, what was wrong with him?

“Y-Yes Jasper, I’m coming.”

She snorted and waited for him to lead the way. Things could have been worse than this, Steven thought, although there was still a chance this was all a trick to get him to follow without complaint and to bring him to his destruction. He was supposed to be put on trial, but any “accidents” would probably be appreciated in any case. Still, the boy could not believe his luck. He was getting off easily for the time being, and even though being a soldier seemed hard, there was no evidence that he would not manage to pull it off. He had always admired the Quartz soldiers battling in the room next to the one he was brought up in, it was a welcome distraction from the dreary days he otherwise spent in his cell.

“Come on, get a move on, we don’t have years!” came Jasper’s harsh voice from behind him. The boy took no time in hurrying along, although not without taking a second to take a glance over his shoulder. Jasper was looming over him, huge weapon in hand, but save for that everything seemed to be normal. The boy hesitated at the door though, unsure of the way to take. He had never known that there was a fork in the hallway at this point, or rather, he had never known what such a thing was.

“This way, clod.”

The huge Gem pushed past him, staggering the smaller being in her wake and leading the way.

“No funny business, or you know where this ax is going.”

The last thing he wanted was to feel the ax in swung at him, so he continued without complaint, his own meek footsteps following in the wake of the huge, pounding ones of the Jasper. Although he nearly had to trot to keep up with her, he couldn’t help but look around, marvelling at the architecture of the corridors around him. He had never seen anything quite as ornate, anything that struck the eye so other than the Gems and weapons that he had the been allowed to see over the years. The ceilling was high and seemed to go on to eternity, the arches holding it up couldn’t be anything other than the sky, after all. Frescoes flowed from the walls, depicting the great battles that Gems had fought and the glory of the Diamonds. Everywhere they were shown, flanked by their armies and individual attributes, and Steven simply couldn’t get enough of them. They were the Gems who had imprisonned him, the ones who had deemed him a menace; and he was the one who had parted them, made sure that one of them was forever gone.

“Miserable creature, how dare you stare at the Diamonds so?”

It wasn’t Jasper’s voice that had snapped Steven out of his reverie, but one that was more metallic, and much higher. The boy turned to see a Gem walk towards them, all in greens and yellows, a short bob framing her face. She was like no other Gem that Steven had ever seen, her thin frame completely different from all the muscular Gems that Steven had been used to see his whole life. She walked without looking in front of her, as if she had walked these halls for thousands of years; she gazed instead at the screen in front of her, touching it from time to time and making wheels expand and retract with her finger.

“Pink Diamond had so much potential, she was going to be on the same level as White one day, you know that, don’t you?”

Steven didn’t know whether to answer or not. There were Gems that hated him, that was for sure, he had crossed the path of quite a few over the years that he had lived here. He was used to them, in a way, the questions, the bugging, the whys and hows. All in all, he found that his best protection was silence, so silent he was. Jasper didn’t react to the other Gem’s presence, in fact, if the boy had been walking astride the orange and red Gem, he would have seen that she had a slight smile on her face.

Soon, a second Gem joined them, then a third, a fourth, a fifth. Each and every one of them asked a question, and in every single question Pink Diamond was mentionned, until the entire hall was filled with Gems of all colour and stature, none caring to look at Steven, but all of their words weaving together to give a hushed whisper, nearly musical but overwhelming in their sheer number.

Steven wasn’t sure whether he could take much more of this. This was already overwhelming enough as it was, there was now another event that he had not thought he would go through today that was happening. He had been used to a boring, never-changing life, and he had problems adapting to something so suddenly.

“Here we are.”

All of the Gems stopped their whispering at once, and with a fluidity and a velocity that astionished the young boy, they moved apart and away, in seconds the only thing that remained of them being the echoes of their chant.

Jasper, the one who had spoken, turned to Steven with the remains of the smile on her face, but they quickly disappeared, soon to be replaced with a scowl.

“It is time. Go inside, and don’t move once you’re on the platform.”

On trembling legs that were not used to holding his weight for this long, Steven went into the room with nothing but the clothes he wore as guard against what was to happen next. Jasper stood at the door, but before he knew it, it was closed, the only thing remaining of the presence that he had found, despite him, reassuring, was but a memory.

He was startled by lights flickering on in the windowless room, one by one leading to the platform that Jasper had told him about. He took a step forward, then another, tentative and tired steps that led him to stand where he had been told to.

Suddenly, a pink light emerged all around him, a light that envelopped him and made him tingle all over. He had never experienced anything quite like it, but there was no way he wanted to ever experience it again, Steven thought, as, worried, he watched jagged lines disappear from his body, gently fading into his flesh and clothes. 


End file.
